Khadijah Costley White at The New York Times writes—For Hope in Trump’s America, I Read Sojourner Truth:
I have been feeling so much despair that, even as a media scholar, I’m often tempted to avoid the news.
The unending stream of political developments that I know will deepen the suffering of my fellow Americans and others around the world is heartbreaking: migrant children separated from their parents, mass shootings that don’t inspire gun control, the crisis in Yemen, threats to women’s rights, and so much more.
It might be surprising to hear that what’s been keeping me going lately is meditating on slavery. I’ve been reading Sojourner Truth’s famous 1851 speech, “Ain’t I a Woman.”
Truth reportedly said: “I could work as much … as a man … and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne 13 children and seen most of them sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”
When Truth asked the group of mostly white women in her audience whether she was a woman, she was not simply pointing to the hypocrisy of Western thought in which nations and “civilized” societies were built on the enslavement, murder and exploitation of women and children. Truth’s question was a provocation, a challenge to a racial structure built on the dehumanization of an entire group of human beings. It was a philosophical gauntlet. Like Black Lives Matter, it was a call to bring clarity to American oppression. Today, it’s also a reminder to me that black people have lived through the very worst of what this country has inflicted. That we have survived.
For the Fourth of July, Keith Williams and Liriel Higa at The New York Times tested us with America, the Quiz. It would have been better if there had been at least one difficult question.
Emily Atkin at The New Republic writes—Can Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Save the Planet?
Progressives have been practically leaping for joy since 28-year-old self-described democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her primary election for Congress last week, an outcome that CNN called “the most shocking upset of a rollicking political season.” But perhaps no group has been more excited than environmentalists. In a political environment where even her fellow Democrats often stay vague on climate change, Ocasio-Cortez has been specific and blunt in talking about the global warming crisis. She also has a plan to fight that crisis—one to transition the United States to a 100-percent renewable energy system by 2035.
To achieve this ambitious goal, she has proposed implementing what she calls a “Green New Deal,” a Franklin Delano Roosevelt–like plan to spur “the investment of trillions of dollars and the creation of millions of high-wage jobs,” according to her official website. “The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan,” she told HuffPost last week. “We must again invest in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and distribution of energy, but this time green energy.”
These positions have earned Ocasio-Cortez significant positive press. HuffPost called her “The Leading Democrat On Climate Change;” Vice called her “the Climate Change Hardliner the Planet Needs.” But those stories also note the political obstacles in Ocasio-Cortez’s way. There’s the climate-denying Republican Party, of course, but there are also Democrats, who have largely ignored climate change this election season and lack an organized plan to tackle it. How can a plan like Ocasio-Cortez’s see the light of day when her own party seems likely to bury it?
David Cay Johnston at The New York Times writes—How to Make Trump’s Tax Returns Public:
On June 14, the New York State attorney general, Barbara Underwood, filed a civil complaint against President Trump and his three oldest children, accusing them of “persistently illegal conduct” in using the Donald J. Trump Foundation as “little more than a checkbook for payments from Mr. Trump or his businesses to nonprofits, regardless of their purpose or legality.”
Ms. Underwood believes there is abundant evidence to bring criminal charges against Mr. Trump as well. She made that position very clear in the letters she sent to the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Election Commission in Washington recommending “further investigation and legal action.”
Ms. Underwood sent those letters, at the same time she filed the civil complaint, because New York state law does not grant her automatic authority to initiate criminal investigations. Her criminal referral to Washington noted that it would be a crime for the president to interfere in such an investigation. However, given Mr. Trump’s assertion that he has the power to halt any criminal inquiry and to pardon himself for federal crimes, a criminal investigation by any part of the federal executive branch seems highly unlikely.
The attorney general could, however, easily gain that authority. All that’s needed is for Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the New York State Police or the state Department of Taxation and Finance to make a request, and the authority would be granted to her. Criminal jurisdiction also rests with Cyrus Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney. Mr. Vance has shown no interest, so far, in investigating other complaints against Mr. Trump.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—The centrist heavenly chorus is off-key:
[...] In another important new book, “Standoff: How America Became Ungovernable,” the veteran political analyst Bill Schneider notes that while polarization did not begin with President Trump (it “has been going on for at least fifty years”), Trump “uses every issue, every policy, every tweet, to set one group of Americans against another.” Divisions around issues related to immigration, race and culture serve the president’s interests.
Ah, but because increasing numbers of Americans identify as independents, isn’t there an eager nonpartisan middle waiting to rescue us from all this.
Sorry, but no. As Abramowitz shows, most people who identify as independents lean toward one party or the other. When it comes to casting ballots, “leaning independents as well as strong and weak party identifiers are voting more along party lines than at any time in the past half century.”
Factoring out independents who tilt toward a party, “only about 12 percent of Americans have fallen into the ‘pure independent’ category, and these people are much less interested in politics and much less likely to vote than independent leaners.” Independents are plainly not some magical force that will call into being that centrist third party that looms so large in the imaginations of many pundits and fundraisers.
Elizabeth Bruenig at The Washington Post writes—Conservatives will always call socialists hypocrites. Ignore them:
Shortly after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old democratic socialist, pulled off a surprise left-flank victory over incumbent Rep. Joseph Crowley in a New York congressional primary last week, pictures of her childhood home began appearing on social media. The grainy image of the small blue cottage was evidently swiped from Google Street View and uploaded to Twitter by conservative television host John Cardillo. The tidy little home, Cardillo tweeted, was in fact “the Yorktown Heights (very nice area) home @Ocasio2018 grew up in before going off to Ivy League Brown University,” he clarified: “A far cry from the Bronx hood upbringing she’s selling.” Got her, in other words: a champagne socialist, after all.
Cardillo was wrong. Ocasio-Cortez was born in the Bronx, though her family moved to Yorktown Heights years later in an effort to place her in better public schools. And she went to Boston University, not Brown University, and not Ivy League. But the failure of one set of accusations along these lines usually just leads to another, and it forms an ugly paradox that applies only to the left: If you care about material equality and you aren’t destitute, you’re a hypocrite; if you care about material equality and you are destitute, you’re never going to have a real shot at political engagement to begin with.
As more left-flank challengers face off with center-left incumbents and more democratic socialists begin looking toward public office, beware: You will all be called champagne socialists or yacht communists, the ritzier and more radical counterparts of limousine liberals. It doesn’t matter how comparatively humble your background is, or how relatively modest your means in the context of the political class at-large — it’ll always be news if Bernie Sanders wears a $700 coat or buys a house by a lake, because his political position on inequality is so obviously moral that the only way to impeach it is to make him seem dishonest about it. The same goes, and will continue to go, for every other candidate who attempts to advance material equality. This stance is hard to supply a persuasive democratic alternative to, so critics instead claim that its standard-bearers don’t really mean it. [...]
Conservatives will continue to skewer as hypocritical anyone who takes exception to the unfair, anti-egalitarian system outlined above by fighting for equality even if they come from inequality’s better side. They will do this to the detriment of everyone on its worse side, and for that reason should be ignored.
The good news is that the ballot initiative David Ulin at the Los Angeles Times blasts below has only a slightly better than zero chance of passing. He writes—Tim Draper's Cal 3 initiative is so awful, it gives direct democracy a bad name:
I’m conflicted about direct democracy. I want to stand in the tradition of the California progressives who, in a 1911 special election, brought ballot initiatives to the state as a way of fighting the corrupt influence of the Southern Pacific Railroad in Sacramento. But when Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper can get a silly and dangerous break-the-state-into-thirds proposition on the ballot, I start to think again.
Come November, we will vote on Draper’s Cal-3 measure. It’s a monumental proposition — destroying a state — and such a notion shouldn’t be decided by a one-time, simple majority vote, not least because we the people might not get the nuances of how destructive it could be. It’s probably unconstitutional, and should it pass (unlikely) and survive legal review (unlikely), it would create hordes of economic, political and cultural losers and very few winners. (The latter would be mostly in the new state of Northern California, where Draper lives, surprise, surprise.)
Suzanne Moore at The Guardian writes—Fundamentalism is coming for us – and women, as ever, will be first:
When Justice Anthony Kennedy announced last week that he will retire from the US supreme court, which means Donald Trump can replace him with a more conservative judge, there was a sharp intake of breath. “Good morning, Gilead” said American women on Twitter. Ever since the TV success of The Handmaid’s Tale, Gilead – the society in Margaret Atwood’s novel where fundamentalist Christians have stripped women of all their rights – has become shorthand for the end of progress. [...]
Like many, I have given up on the second series. One was enough. Reality is enough. In an abstract way I am interested in finding out how Gilead was formed and where resistance to it might lie, but I cannot stomach any more torture scenes. If I want to watch terrified women, I can watch the news.
We are told we have come a long way and that we are free. We look at other parts of the world, where women are not allowed to vote, or dance, and we see ourselves as modern and liberated. But all our “freedoms” are fairly recent, from being able to get a mortgage to being protected from rape in marriage.
The narrative of progress is one that too many liberals imbibe, but it is untrue. Progress is not linear.
Basav Sen at In These Times writes—As We Celebrate “Independence,” Remember That the U.S. Left Its Colony Puerto Rico to Die:
[...] Puerto Rico is effectively a U.S. colony, with no representation in Congress. Philip Alston, the UN's Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty who recently toured the United States, explicitly linked the territory's economic and environmental devastation to its colonial status. “Political rights and poverty are inextricably linked in Puerto Rico,” he said. “In a country that likes to see itself as the oldest democracy in the world and a staunch defender of political rights on the international stage, more than 3 million people who live on the island have no power in their own capital.”
This isn’t the first time the UN has paid attention to U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico, either. It holds hearings on decolonization of Puerto Rico every year and produces lengthy reports. The United States doesn’t bother to attend the hearings, blowing one off as recently as this month.
Josephine Livingstone at The New Republic writes—Rod Dreher’s Bad History:
Rod Dreher, the American Conservative editor and blogger, has found himself in yet another race-related controversy. He was lately on vacation in the Azores, the archipelago of autonomous Portuguese islands in the mid-Atlantic, where he met a man named Miguel Monjardino. Dreher and Monjadino ate limpets on the island of Terceira, “grilled in their shell, in olive oil and chopped garlic.” They wandered around Angra do Heroísmo, the island’s capital, and discussed how it was once “vital to Portuguese trade in the East Indies,” back in the fifteenth century when Portugal claimed half the world. Lost empires were on the brain apparently, and that’s how Dreher ended up making this sweeping, provocative, and dubious claim:
The massive migration of barbarians into the Roman Empire, in the 4th through 6th centuries, changed European civilization permanently. They caused the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and centuries later, the rise of a new civilization there, based on the descendants of old Roman stock and Christianized Germanic tribes. Will the latter-day descendants of those Europeans be able to hold back the “barbarian invasions” from Africa in the 21st century? Or will they have to do as the Romans did and absorb the strangers, and, over centuries, create a new civilization? These are the stakes.
In a follow-up blog post, Dreher wrote of his disbelief at being called a racist for describing African people (whom he does not differentiate) as “barbarians.” It was “perfectly just,” he said. He is descended from the white barbarians, after all, he pointed out. Why is it such a crime to use the Greeks’ word for people who were not like them? It goes back to his point, a “loss of historical consciousness in the contemporary West.” In his time with Monjardino, they discussed “what it means that so many young people in the West today know nothing of the intellectual and cultural legacy of the West, much less care about it.” What a loss it is, that the young do not remember how the Greeks disdained “more primitive and therefore inferior” civilizations.
Dreher is wrong on the history of Rome, but the facts are not as worrisome as the ideological bias that has driven him to error. As we have seen repeatedly over the last year, elements of the right are mobilizing a historically fictional vision of a “white” past in order to glue their identity together in the contemporary world.
David Cole at The Nation writes—Why Anthony Kennedy Was a Moderating Force on the Supreme Court:
The first case I litigated before Justice Anthony Kennedy, who announced his retirement on June 27 after more than 30 years on the Supreme Court, was Texas v. Johnson, the 1989 case that established that the First Amendment protects flag-burning. Kennedy, a mild-mannered Reagan appointee, was no flag-burner. But he provided the crucial fifth vote to strike down Texas’s law.
A few years later, I invited him to guest-teach my constitutional-law class at Georgetown. I said he could talk about anything; he chose the flag-burning case. But his real subject was judging. In his hour with the students, he not only stressed the importance of having an open mind, but exemplified it in his openness to the students themselves. Not all judges are like this; Justice Antonin Scalia was always absolutely certain about his views when speaking to students (or to anyone else, for that matter).
I remember arguing to a colleague, a noted gay-rights scholar, that this characteristic meant that Kennedy might be persuaded to vote in favor of other progressive causes. My colleague dismissed the idea, sure that Kennedy would play to type and vote consistently conservative.
Yet it was Kennedy who wrote every one of the Court’s decisions protecting gay and lesbian rights, including pathbreaking decisions striking down a Colorado referendum that barred protection against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and invalidating a Texas law making same-sex “sodomy” a crime. And most importantly, he wrote the majority opinions in United States v. Windsor and Obergefell v. Hodges, both 5–4 decisions extending constitutional protection to the marriage of same-sex couples. In these and other decisions, he saw in anti-LGBTQ measures a direct affront to the equal dignity of all persons.
Dave Kamper at Jacobin writes—How to Defeat the Post-Janus Union Attacks:
[...] ultimately, labor will need to go beyond these reactive measures. It’s tempting to look at Janus as reason to get into a defensive crouch, but that would be a huge mistake. Unions need to remind their members that our source of power is in our people, not our dues money, and that no Supreme Court case can change that.
One good way to do that is to use Janus to become more open and democratic around political action. One of the great ironies of Janus (and Friedrichs before it) is that the plaintiff’s case was based on the premise that all public-sector union activity is inherently political. Those of us on the union side sometimes only wish that were so.
Today, most public-sector unions go to great lengths to segregate their political activities, like electoral endorsements and policy campaigns, from the “normal” stuff unions do. Political decisions are deferred to executive boards or semi-independent political action committees. Member input is not only not sought, it is treated as a distraction — in no small part because many union leaders fear that political decisions will be internally divisive. Political “experts” in the union world are used to isolating themselves from members, treating them as an annoyance to be avoided rather than as our primary resource.
Unions that behave this way are vulnerable to the opt-out campaign’s claims that they are merely fundraising vehicles for the Democratic Party. In politics, the process matters. Members who are considering opting out will feel even more reason to do so if it seems to them that the union is making big political stands without consulting them. Conversely, even someone who might not agree with their union’s political endorsements is more likely to stay in if they know they have a real voice in how those decisions are made.
Ruth Marcus at The Washington Post writes—The Trump Supreme Court pick who’d pose the biggest danger to abortion rights:
Of all the potential Supreme Court nominees that President Trump is considering, the one who seems most inclined to undo Kennedy’s work and overturn Roe as completely and quickly as possible is Amy Coney Barrett, a 46-year-old newly minted (last November) federal appeals court judge. [...]
“I tend to agree with those who say that a justice’s duty is to the Constitution and that it is thus more legitimate for her to enforce her best understanding of the Constitution rather than a precedent she thinks clearly in conflict with it,” Barrett wrote in 2013.
In a 2003 article, Barrett called for a more “flexible” understanding of stare decisis, arguing that courts should be less focused, in deciding whether to overrule a case, on so-called reliance interests — the degree to which a decision has been woven into the settled expectations of those affected.